[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 78 (Thursday, May 22, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H4821-H4825]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ADDRESSING SENATORS' COMMENTS
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Valadao). Under the Speaker's announced
policy of January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Iowa
(Mr. King) for 30 minutes.
[[Page H4822]]
Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, it is my honor and privilege to
address you here on the floor of the United States House of
Representatives, and I come to the floor this afternoon, Mr. Speaker,
to address you and bring up the topic of the dialogue that has been--I
will say flowing forth on the floor of the United States Senate over
the last few weeks.
As I listened to that dialogue and listened to the way they have
taken Saul Alinsky's ``Rules for Radicals'' and decided that they are
going to implement them and deploy them on the floor of the United
States Senate, it occurs to me that when, out of the mouths of people
like Senator Schumer and Senator Reid and Senator Durbin come these
allegations--and sometimes allegations that name and target Members of
the House of Representatives, it occurs to me that, when I came to this
Congress, Mr. Speaker, in 2003, there was a rule that existed here that
prevented a Member of the House of Representatives from naming a United
States Senator here on the floor.
It was kind of a shield of protectionism, so that the Senators could
not be directly criticized in the dialogue that we have here on the
floor.
My good friend and then-Member of Congress, Tom Feeney from Florida,
read through the rules, as a good, honest lawyer, newly elected to the
United States Congress would, and he saw that rule and wondered: Why
can't we utter the name of a United States Senator on the floor of the
House of Representatives?
He could come up with no reason why we shouldn't be able to do that,
and so he brought an amendment to the rules that struck that
prohibition, and thereafter, thanks to then-Congressman Tom Feeney of
Orlando, the rule is gone. It was amended, and that is a good thing
because, now, I can actually name the people who are attacking me on
the floor of the United States Senate, and let you know, Mr. Speaker,
what is going on in that other body, that body that constantly calls
for bipartisan work and bipartisan cooperation.
This is what I get from Senator Chuck Schumer, New York, May 1, 2014,
on the floor of the United States Senate. He decided he would target me
and blame me for the things that he believes are failures of the entire
House of Representatives.
Here are some of the quotes that Chuck Schumer uttered on that day of
May 1 from the floor of the United States Senate. He called me ``an
extreme outlier on the issue of immigration reform.''
I would direct Chuck Schumer to the Republican Party platform. You
will find there language in the Republican Party platform that supports
the position I have long held on immigration, and that position that I
hold is this: We need to respect the rule of law. We need to secure our
borders. We need to have an immigration policy that is designed to
enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the
United States of America.
It can't be for the Democratic Party of the United States of America
because they are so closely aligned--in fact, they have enveloped the
entire Progressive Party. The Progressive Party comes to this floor on
a regular basis and gives speeches and presents their position.
Their position, at one time, could be found on the Democratic
Socialists of America Web site, dsausa.org. There, socialism is
celebrated. As Progressives celebrate socialism, they are wrapped up
inside the Democratic Party.
We don't adhere to that on my side. We adhere to the rule of law and
the Constitution, a secure border, a sovereign United States of
America, and a policy for immigration that is designed to enhance the
economic, social, and cultural well-being of the United States of
America.
We have enough common sense, Mr. Speaker, to know that our country is
limited in size and scope. It is a large country, but we cannot be the
relief valve for all of the poverty in the world.
There are 7 billion people on the planet, and if they all have good
sense, they would all want to live here. We need some of them in those
countries to rebuild those countries and establish American principles,
so that they can enjoy the prosperity that we enjoy, reconstructed
around first principles, in the other countries of the world.
{time} 1400
We need to lead the world. We don't need to necessarily bring all the
world here to feed the world here in the United States. And so, an
extreme outlier, not so. Chuck Schumer represents the extreme outliers,
and they are socialists, Marxists, progressives, liberal Democrats. I
am sure that one of those labels will be one that he has already
embraced, Mr. Speaker.
Second quote, Senator Chuck Schumer of me, Steve King:
The rhetoric of Steve King is beyond the pale. I am certain
that the majority of Republicans in the House have their
stomachs churn when they see Steve King spew that kind of
rhetoric.
That is not exactly collegial dialogue, Mr. Speaker, to see that kind
of thing. What I wonder is why would Chuck Schumer think that he would
know when the stomachs of Republicans might churn. I think they might
churn when they hear him say those things. Although, rest easy, Mr.
Speaker, mine doesn't.
I take this all with good humor because I understand that it is a
tactic. It is an Alinsky tactic, and it is designed to bring out a
goal. It is not necessarily to raise me up to the point where he
assigns me with the full sense of responsibility and authority to
determine immigration policy here in the House of Representatives. Oh,
I wish it were so, Mr. Speaker. I don't believe it is so. Yes, there is
some influence there. History will decide how much--not me, not Chuck
Schumer.
Here is his goal: I believe that Senator Schumer has concluded that
he could taunt the leadership and the House of Representatives, and
that includes our Speaker of the House, into bringing amnesty
legislation to the floor of the House because, if it does and if it
should pass, the Senate would conform with any amnesty legislation
because they are controlled by Democrats.
I have long known and long been restrained by people in my own party,
Mr. Speaker, from laying out the argument as to why almost every
Democrat I know wants open borders and amnesty and a never-ending
supply of illegal aliens in the United States of America.
It is a pretty easy formula to figure out, especially if you sit here
for 10 or a dozen years engaged in hearings and debate on a weekly
basis, you begin to hear the thread of their conversation and you begin
to understand the real truth behind their motives. It works out to be
this:
Of course there are a large number of illegal immigrants in the
United States. We have been using the number 11 million since we
stopped using the number 12 million, but they didn't stop coming into
America. I don't quite understand why we would think that there are
fewer illegal aliens in America today than there were 10 years ago. I
believe there are more.
If they come across the border at the rates that the witnesses from
the Border Patrol and other witnesses in the hearings have been
testifying, they will say that they will stop perhaps 25 percent that
try. When I go down to the border and ask them, they will say, well, 10
percent has to come first. It is probably not 10. Some will say, with a
little smirk, 3 percent is maybe what we stop.
If I take the 25 percent, 25 percent effectiveness on our border and
you look at those whom they do interdict on the border and you do the
calculation, that turns out to be a number that is equivalent to 11,000
a night--on average, 11,000 a night coming across our southern border.
That would be at some of the peak levels that we have, Mr. Speaker. I
would think it is more objective for us to dial that number back down
to somewhere in the neighborhood of about half of that. So half of
11,000, 5,500 a night is pretty close to the last reliable information
that I found on how many are coming across our border illegally.
Well, so I asked this question: What was the size of Santa Anna's
army? About that, about 5,500 or 6,000. So it gives you a sense, the
size of Santa Anna's army coming across our southern border every
night, on average. I don't say day and night. Most of it is at night. I
have sat down on the border at night multiple times. I have traveled
[[Page H4823]]
the border and done multiple trips down there to monitor what is going
on on our southern border. It has gotten a little better in Arizona,
and it has gotten worse in Texas.
We don't have control of this border, but that doesn't trouble most
Democrats, because they recognize that the millions of people that are
coming into this country illegally are counted in the census. And so,
if you would go to a district in California like Maxine Waters'
district, she only needs about 40,000 to 50,000 votes in her district
to get reelected to the United States Congress. If you go to my
district, it is well over 120,000 votes for me to be reelected to the
United States Congress. The difference in that is two things. One is I
have a very, very high percentage of real American citizens that do
vote in my district; she has a lower percentage. And I have a higher
turnout of people who are responsible enough to vote; she has a lower
percentage.
Illegal aliens are counted in the census all over America, and when
new district lines are drawn, those district lines treat people the
same as citizens. The Constitution doesn't say count the citizens and
then reapportion; it says count the people.
And so Democrats are happy enough to see the country filling up with
people that they get to count when they do a district, because they get
a Democrat district that is another vote here in the House of
Representatives, Mr. Speaker. They want to turn this country into a
single-party country.
When you think of what happened in California, they are trying to
bring about the same kind of transition in Texas. If they can turn
Texas from a red State into a blue State, there will never be another
conservative elected to a national office in this country again. They
know that. That is why they have thousands of their operatives working
in Texas, trying to turn Texas over into a blue State.
They know that illegal immigration is an essential key. Back in 2007
or so when they bussed in tens of thousands of demonstrators, many of
them self-professed illegal aliens in America, many of them wearing
identical T-shirts that were issued to them apparently on the bus,
then-alive Senator Teddy Kennedy stepped out to the west lawn of the
Capitol and stepped up to the microphone and, through an interpreter,
said to that group of people, who was interpreting to them in Spanish,
he said:
Some say, report to be deported; I say, report to become an
American citizen.
That was the Democrats' clarion call, the call out to illegal aliens
in America to migrate toward the Democrat Party, to those that are
outside of America to come into America and migrate towards the
Democrat Party. They operate in those neighborhoods doing voter
registration drives and signups and organizations, a lot of it funded
by Federal dollars that matriculates down into their organizations.
They do know what they are doing. They have built a cultural edifice
around much of the minority community in America, and much of it has
been because, Mr. Speaker, they have been telling them lies. They have
been telling them lies about the political opponents of the leftists
that are engaged in those neighborhoods; and we have seen this flow,
Mr. Speaker, as far as the White House.
The divisions that have been driven between Americans, divisions
driven down the line of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation,
national origin, prosperity, those wedges have been driven in a
calculated way for the political gain of the people that sit over on
this side of this Chamber. I have seen too much of it to believe that I
could be off by 1 degree in the statement that I have made, Mr.
Speaker.
I am continuing onward, Senator Schumer of myself:
Steve King, a far right, way out of the mainstream outlier
doesn't just spew hatred; he calls the shots.
Hmm, I don't think that he could point to any hatred that I have
spoken to and identified as spewing. Calling the shots? No, I hear the
wisdom of the Republican Conference. I have to hear what they say and
what they think and where they anchor their thoughts. We have coalesced
on this, Mr. Speaker: whatever we might do to change immigration law,
we can't trust the President of the United States to enforce anything
he doesn't like. It doesn't just have to be immigration law; it can be
anything.
The President of the United States picks and chooses the laws that he
will enforce. He essentially tells us: I am not going to enforce this
series of laws because I don't like them, and I am not going to enforce
these series of laws because I don't like them. It is not just
immigration; although, that was some of the first examples and some of
the most egregious examples, Mr. Speaker.
And we saw them come through as the Morton memos, and I will circle
back to that in a moment. We saw the President, by executive edict, not
always in executive order, sometimes a third-tier notice on a Web site
of the United States Treasury, sometimes a verbal statement that he
makes before a press conference in the Rose Garden at noon on a Friday.
The President of the United States will step up and say, for example,
when he was speaking to the churches who objected to their religious
freedom being taken from them, their conscience protection that was to
be assured to them, written into the ObamaCare law, after they took
that religious freedom, conscience protection away from our people of
faith, and in particular the Catholic churches that filed multiple
lawsuits, and other religious organizations did the same, the President
was taking 2 weeks of heat and criticism as the faith communities rose
up, and he decided to put an end to that. So he held a press conference
at the White House at noon on a Friday, and with the Presidential seal
in front of the podium, he stood there and said: I am going to make an
accommodation to the religious organizations in America, and now I am
going to require the insurance companies to provide these things for
free.
Well, these things were contraceptives, abortifacients, and
sterilizations. Contraceptives, Mr. Speaker, we understand what they
are. Abortifacients are pills that bring about the abortion of a
little, innocent, unborn baby. Sterilizations are those things that
might come with tubal ligations or vasectomies. Those were the things
that were in ObamaCare that are particularly egregious to the
principles of the Catholic church.
And so the President decided he would make an accommodation written
in the rules, by the way--not the bill, but in the rules. The President
said: I am going to make an accommodation to the religious
organizations, and now I am going to require the insurance companies to
provide these things for free. He repeated himself. He said: Provide
these things for free. For free.
I thought, hmm, how is it that the President can step up and give a
press conference and change a law or change a rule that has been
published by Kathleen Sebelius' Health and Human Services? How does the
President have the authority to simply speak and make those changes?
Surely there must be a rule that is amended. Surely there must be a
bill that has been introduced that has a lot of responsible cosponsors,
that has a prospect of being passed. Maybe he has got an agreement with
our Speaker and majority leader here and Harry Reid over in the Senate.
So we went back and scoured the rule, Mr. Speaker. The rule didn't
change, not one i dotted differently, not one t crossed differently.
There was no change in any written document, the written document that
required the religious organizations to provide contraceptives,
abortifacients, and sterilizations.
The President said now the insurance companies have to do this for
free. Not one word changed in print anywhere. The insurance companies
stepped up to that verbal directive from the President of the United
States. That should be appalling to any American citizen that took an
eighth grade civics course to understand that the President doesn't
write the laws. The President doesn't have the authority to change
them. Congress has granted to the executive branch the authority to
write rules, an Administrative Procedure Act that directs how those
rules that are proposed by the executive branch are published for open
public hearing. There is a process they must go through.
The President is not the king. The President doesn't get to issue
edicts verbally from the podium and have the force and effect of law to
change that
[[Page H4824]]
policy without any print being changed anywhere in a rule or in the
Federal Register or in the Federal Code. That is what he did with that
particular case, Mr. Speaker. I use that as an example to tell you how
far this President has overreached from his constitutional authority.
So the President has first imposed contraceptives, abortifacients,
and sterilizations on our religious organizations, then lifted the
imposition verbally by telling the insurance companies: Now you are
going to have to do this for free. What did they do? They complied.
They listened to the President's press conference and decided, okay, we
are going to do what he tells us. They didn't go back and check the
text--well, maybe the text of the press conference, maybe the text of
his speech, but there was no rule. There was no law.
The President also suspended welfare-to-work. The temporary
assistance to needy families was written that required welfare-to-work.
It was written so that then Bill Clinton couldn't circumvent it. It was
written tightly and with the idea that a President would stretch it.
What happens? This President simply suspended welfare-to-work under
TANF.
What else happened? How about President Bush's No Child Left Behind
on education?
{time} 1415
President Obama has now issued so many waivers that No Child Left
Behind no longer exists. These were acts of the United States Congress
nullified by executive acts of the President of the United States.
We will accept it if the court over across the street will nullify a
law that is passed by the Congress and signed by the President, if they
rule it unconstitutional. Most of the time we accept that. Sometimes we
reject their judgment because we take an oath to the Constitution too,
Mr. Speaker.
But we should be appalled at the constitutional violations of the
President of the United States, who has continually overreached on
immigration, on education, on welfare-to-work, on ObamaCare itself: the
bill with his name and his signature. There are more than 30 changes
that the President has brought about on that. Some of them are clearly
unconstitutional. Most of them are difficult to litigate to a
successful conclusion.
Who calls the shots here? Well, I make recommendations like anybody
else does. Each Member follows their own conscience. It is nice to get
the assignment--Senator Schumer, he says: They listen to me. Well, yes,
and we listen to each other.
Here is another quote from Senator Schumer. He said that I am
winning:
Steve King has three wins, the rest of the Republican Party
and the rest of America is winless. Good for him, terrible
for us. King is in the driver's seat of immigration reform
and as long as he sits there, things will continue to be
stuck in a rut.
Stuck in a rut, in the driver's seat, the rest of America is winless.
No, the rest of America is winning each day that we can protect the
rule of law, each day that we have something left that we can use to
secure our borders, each day that we can deploy some type of law
enforcement at the local government, State government, and the Federal
Government too, out on the streets of America, that at least slows down
this influx of illegal immigration that we have.
America is not winless when that happens. America would be wiped out
from a perspective of the rule of law and the future and the destiny
for our country if we allowed people like Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid,
and Dick Durbin to set the policy for immigration. If they did that,
the rule of law, at least with regard to immigration, would be
destroyed, be gone. We couldn't reconstruct it again in our lifetime.
Not just our lifetime, Mr. Speaker, but the lifetime of this Republic.
I would ask this question, Mr. Speaker: Has anybody read the Senate
Gang of Eight immigration bill? I have. I have read through that entire
bill, and I come to this conclusion. They have sent to us from the
United States Senate a bill on immigration. It is expansive. It covers
all kinds of things. But it is this: it is instantaneous amnesty for
almost everybody that is in America illegally, instantaneous amnesty.
It is prospective amnesty to the extent that it does not address how we
might address people who get into America after the bill might be
enacted. So the prospects are that it would be the next wave of those
who would be, according to their description, living in the shadows.
So if we are not going to enforce the law in the future or if we are
going to pass a Senate version of the bill--and we are not, but the
Senate version of the bill, if it becomes law, doesn't do anything to
bring about enforcement for those who would violate our immigration
laws in the future, nothing. It may do something on the border. A $40
billion Corker amendment blows the budget substantially without a
guarantee that it is going to be functional. But is instantaneous
amnesty for those that are here. It is prospective amnesty for those
who would come here. And, Mr. Speaker, it is retroactive amnesty. And
that means it goes back to those who have been deported in the past and
says: We really didn't mean it. Why don't you apply to come back to
America, you all come back now, you hear, because we really can't have
deported you in the past and let people stay in America under the same
conditions that we deported you in the past. That is the Senate version
of the bill. It is ludicrous from a commonsense heart of the heartland
middle America viewpoint, where we respect and love the rule of law.
So Mr. Schumer, Senator Schumer, went on: He called for my expulsion
from the Republican Party. I am pretty sure they are not going to
listen to Chuck Schumer on that. He says:
They can show some courage and say that the Steve Kings in
the world can say whatever they want, but they have no place
in a modern Republican Party.
Imagine a leftist activist, deploying Alinsky tactics on the floor of
the United States Senate, who would tell the Republican Party that they
should expel me, who in a lot of ways has stood with the entire
platform consistently for a long time. I would have to go change the
platform first. It would be easier just to become a Democrat. However,
their ranks are not swelling as fast as ours are. Commonsense is
prevailing, and we are seeing Republican majorities in the States, a
likely Republican majority expanded here in the House of
Representatives, and a real good shot at a Republican majority in the
United States Senate. What does that say about who is calling the shots
in America? It is not Chuck Schumer, it is not Harry Reid, it is not
Dick Durbin.
So he continues. Two weeks later--he hadn't had enough--two weeks
later he comes to the floor of the Senate again and goes through a
series of some of the same things, which I will skip down through a
little bit more quickly:
Far-right extremists, such as Congressman Steve King.
Another:
What has the House actually done on immigration these past
2 years?
This is Chuck Schumer:
Nothing. Look it up. This is what Steve King wants, he
wants the House to do nothing. He is winning and America is
losing.
Well, no, the House has done something. In the appropriations bill
last year, June 6, 2013, Department of Homeland Security Appropriations
bill, I brought an amendment, an amendment that shut off all funding to
implement or enforce the President's unconstitutional actions and exert
constitutional actions that had to do with DACA, the Deferred Action
for Childhood Arrivals, and for prosecutorial discretion known as the
Morton Memos.
The President's action is unconstitutional. He has no prosecutorial
discretion to identify classes or groups of people and then exempt them
from the law. Prosecutorial discretion must be on an individual basis;
it cannot be on a group. They violated that. They know it. I read their
material and debated with them and initiated a lawsuit. We are somewhat
sidetracked right now on that. It is the nature of the thing.
My amendment passed this Congress 224 to 201. That is not nothing.
That is restoring the rule of law and the Constitution immigration
policy after it has been violated by the President of the United
States. We sent that out of the House of Representatives, Mr. Speaker.
We set it on Harry Reid's desk, and there it likely went into his
[[Page H4825]]
drawer and he took no action on it. So it is not that the House isn't
doing anything, it is that the Senate did something really illogical:
the Gang of Eight's bill for instantaneous, perpetual, and retroactive
amnesty.
And then we have the number three-ranking Democrat in the Senate
trying to taunt the Speaker of the House into doing something equally
as foolish: bring amnesty to the floor of the House. This place would
blow up and the American people would arrive here in short order
because they love the rule of law. Not only natural born Americans, not
only naturalized Americans, green card holders that come here to
achieve the American Dream. That means from any country they came from
and every country they came from, those who came here to love America
and respect and appreciate the American Dream.
But what is happening is it is being eroded by destruction of the
rule of law for political motivation on the part of people like Barack
Obama, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin.
There is another quote here by Chuck Schumer that says:
Enough is enough. We will not let our party be hijacked by
extremists whose xenophobia causes them to prefer maintaining
a broken system over achieving a tough, fair, and practical
long-term solution.
Xenophobia. I had to look that up when we came to this Congress. We
don't use that in the streets where I come from, but I have known its
definition for a long time: being afraid of something that you don't
know. Well, I don't often get accused of being afraid of anything, so
when I am I pay a little bit of attention to that.
I would say this. Chuck Schumer is not like me. I am not afraid of
him so it is not xenophobia. Harry Reid is not like me. I am not afraid
of Harry Reid, so that is not xenophobia. Dick Durbin is not like me. I
am not afraid of him. That is not xenophobia. What xenophobia are they
talking about, Mr. Speaker, is my question?
So if we are going to have some kind of a challenge of rhetoric
bouncing back and forth between the House and the Senate, let's do it
face to face, let's do it eye to eye. Let's have that duel, not like
Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton--I would be the one standing on the
high ground on that--but let's do it like real men do it today, not
dueling pistols at 50 paces, let's do this with microphones within
arm's reach, Mr. Speaker. Maybe we could get to the bottom of this and
we could determine who exactly had the xenophobia.
I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair would remind Members that while
debate may include policy criticisms of the President and Members of
the Senate, it is not in order to engage in personalities toward those
parties.
____________________